From 2020:
UAE-Israel Peace Deal: How Trump Administration Defied Experts
"Perhaps the most impregnable piece of conventional wisdom over the last three and a half years was that there was no way that Jared Kushner could possibly move the ball on Middle East peace...
But here we are, with Israel and the United Arab Emirates signing a historic normalization agreement at the White House. Bahrain has now also agreed to normalize relations with Israel, a move it couldn’t have made without Saudi assent.
All of this is what Joe Biden might call a BFD. When the three leaders — President Trump, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed — were considering their handiwork over the phone, according to a senior administration official, “MBZ said, ‘Hey, 2020’s been a really tough year. This has got to be the best news of 2020.’ And the president said, ‘Yeah, what do you think, Bibi?’ And Bibi said, ‘Are you kidding me? This is the best news in the last 20 years.’”...
The story of the diplomatic breakthrough is, at bottom, one of Trump making bold moves in the region, which set the conditions for new thinking to work, even as elite opinion was starkly — and, of course, unapologetically — wrong every step of the way.
Rather than ending any possibility of peace in the region, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem forged a tight relationship of trust with Israel that made everything else possible.
Rather than alienating our allies, pulling out of the Iran deal drew our allies in the region closer to us.
Rather than causing a war, as even some of Trump’s ideological allies feared, the killing of Soleimani sent an unmistakable message of resolve. “I think that the Soleimani killing was a huge boon,” says the senior administration official, “because it showed that the president was bold and was serious, and I think that shifted the Middle East massively.”
Of course, all of this ran exactly counter to Barack Obama’s strategy in
the region. As a State Department official puts it: “When we came into
office, the United States and the prior administration had alienated our
Gulf partners, Israel, and the Palestinians, which is really hard to
do. They had tried to accommodate Iran and to strengthen Iran as part of
a larger gamble that it would moderate Iran.”
Trump’s Riyadh speech enunciated a change of approach. “We were going to counter Iran, we were going to stand with Israel, and we were going to stand with our partners,” the official says. After the speech, “we were in some huge hotel lobby talking to a bunch of Arab foreign ministers that I knew, and they just said, ‘Oh, finally somebody who gets the region,’” he recalls. “Obama just kept looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope.”...
What was clear was that the prior consensus approach hadn’t worked. Kushner recalls going to the U.N. Security Council with a presentation:
And what I showed them is that every time the peace process failed, two things happened: One, the Palestinians got more money, and two, Israel expanded settlements. And so I said, “Why would either party ever make a deal if both sides were getting what they wanted?”
The beginning of a fresh approach was to build the trust of the Israelis, hence the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the relocation of the embassy, and the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
This also made an impression on Arab leaders. Trump “ended up winning the respect of Arabs because he’s a guy that keeps his promises,” the State Department official says. “They’ve seen all these other presidents come into office, and none of them move the embassy.” Kushner notes that relocating the embassy and other moves were “all things that showed people that Trump isn’t going to be dissuaded by threats of violence.”
Then, the administration made the Palestinians good-faith offers on economic development and peace that ended up underlining Palestinian rejectionism and opening up a different path forward.
The administration held a conference in Bahrain last year, the centerpiece of which was a $50 billion economic plan for the Palestinian Territories. The Palestinians didn’t even bother to attend. “It showed that everyone was interested in helping the Palestinians,” Kushner says. “But the Palestinians looked like fools for not showing up. So over the course of this, we really exposed the fact that the Palestinian leadership was not interested in actually making peace, they were just keeping the conflict going.”
The administration’s plan for a two-state solution, including a detailed map, was also categorically rejected by the Palestinians. As Abbas put it, “we say a thousand times over: no, no, no.”
The usual M.O. would be for Washington to try to push the Israelis to give the Palestinians even more. Not this time. “When the Palestinians complained and there was a huge problem,” says the senior administration official, “we didn’t stand down.”...
The region had simply begun to move on. “I went around the region repeatedly just when we got into office,” says the State Department official of his discussions with Arab officials. “And one thing I kept listening for but I never heard was Palestinians. They want to talk about Iran. They want to talk about jobs. They want to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood. I mean, on their list of five, the Palestinian stuff doesn’t even crack the top five.”
A U.S. negotiator describes his own conversations with Arab states prior to releasing the peace plan. “So as we’re talking through,” he says, “you see here’s the Palestinians not engaging, not willing to negotiate, not willing to talk to you, and then regional heads who honestly are more nervous about Iran than they are about anything else, and see Israel as a potential ally in that fight who are wistful at the lost opportunity.”...
The administration’s pressure campaign on Iran was a crucial backdrop. “My view was that it’s impossible to get any peace agreement between the Gulf nations and Israel if you have the wrong Iran strategy,” the State Department official says, noting that foreign leaders and ministers have told him over and over that they consider the Iran deal “a betrayal.” He dismissed Joe Biden’s statement after the Israel-UAE deal, in which he almost took credit for the deal by talking about all the meetings he had with the UAE and Israel when he was in office.
“There’s no way,” he says. “He could have had 30 more years in office and could have never gotten it, because they didn’t trust him. They don’t trust the United States when we partner with our adversaries and marginalize and distance ourselves from our friends.”...
Looking ahead, one can see that the leverage of the Palestinian leadership has demonstrably been reduced, since normalization was to be one of the prizes of Israeli-Palestinian peace, and there’s a sense that the region is moving on without it.
It’s possible that the new state of play could create an opening for political change among the Palestinians. Says the U.S. negotiator:
I think the Palestinian people look around and they say to themselves, “Wait a second. Why is it that those countries can sit at the table, but our leadership has chosen the path of just completely, obstinately sticking out, saying, ‘We’re not going to negotiate with you’?”"
